Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Eithne Browne, Paul Broughton, Stephen Fletcher, Jessica Guise, Colin Hoult, Adam Search, Angela Simms, Michael Starke.

St Jude’s Primary School has been placed into Special Measures, the universal, one size fits all term, to denote that somewhere something is not right with the system.

When Tory M.P. Thomas Winters feels the wrath of the P.M.s anger at being hit by a croquet mallet in a particularly painful constituency, he is dispatched to tick the right sort of boxes in a North of England school and make amends. The fall out, the so called oppressed kicking downwards is not new but for the Head Master and staff of St. Jude’s the fall of basic humility and understanding looking them in the eyes is one that is too much to bear.

With Liverpool institution Michael Starke playing the steading moral role as Head with ease, the humour of the piece was delivered with great timing by the likes of Stephen Fletcher, making a tremendous welcome return to the Royal Court, as the local cleric who has begun to question his faith, the wonderful Eithne Browne who you would always want as a teacher of merit and the superb Angela Simms as a single parent mother trying to improve herself and  who has become such a firm favourite of Royal Court audiences.

Colin Hoult deserves much praise for playing the part of the bitter and thoroughly unpleasant Tory M.P. with enough style to show that and closed mind and opinion taken too far can only ever lead to confrontation. The resentment it causes is not healthy and leads quite rightly to people fighting back. The play also struck on a cord on an age old question. Who really should be in charge of Education? A teacher with 30 or more years’ experience dealing with the current issues of the day or a Government minister of any persuasion who gets his facts from tables and charts and never from having to have separated a class on the verge of meltdown due to a hostility between two people or with great care taken a 15 year old through their course work whilst coping with the loss of a parent right before their final exams?

Special Measures is one of those plays that gets to you on all levels. The audience rightly enjoying the humour that Mark Davies Markham brings to any script and the fury of realising, if they already didn’t, that perhaps the agenda, so well employed in the writing, is one in which people still expect each child to be exactly the same, that what interests one should interest another and by that and their responses to it, should be judged.

A superbly written play by Mark Davies Markham, as important to life as his play Eric’s and performed with the dedication of a cast who understood exactly what was being said. A lesson for us all.

Ian D. Hall